In creating software for business applications, one must take into consideration that businesses have typically used a variety of mechanisms to control and analyze business operations such as accounting, payroll, human resources, sales orders, employee tracking, customer relations tracking, etc. Tools which provide these functions are often implemented using computer software and may be built using a type of computer automated assistance called a framework or business framework. A software package may provide a user interface in order for a user to easily enter and view data corresponding to the various business operations. The software package is also configured to access and update the data, which is stored in a database.
Business applications are designed to handle various business events, such as order fulfillment and shipment. The business applications include application features that are implemented using code. In addition to code, business applications include a number of abstractions to interact with the code when executing the business applications. The MICROSOFT BUSINESS FRAMEWORK® (MBF), for example, offers a broad range of framework defined abstractions (Entity, Operation, . . . ) to the business developer and a single abstraction (Property Pattern), that allows the business developer to capture business logic for reusability. For example, one abstraction is a business entity that models storing data pertaining to a customer or sales order. These entities (or objects) contain classes for storing data.
Business applications contain many different patterns involving one or more of these entities, i.e., an Entity Pattern. The same pattern is often manually repeated numerous times within the same application and without a way of capturing the pattern. Thus, the original pattern will in practice eventually become blurred. If a developer desires to apply the same pattern again, it is impossible to tell which one of the applications is the original one. If the original patterns change, every application must manually be validated against the pattern and changed accordingly.
In this regard, there is a need for systems and methods that provide developers a way to capture structural patterns consisting of multiple entities and related logic having automatic validation of the entities at design time.